Maintaining sterility in manufacturing processes is often a concern. In one particular example applied in conventional manufacturing settings, receptacles with outlets provided by sanitary fittings are often required to interconnect with other sanitary fittings. These sanitary fittings are typically connected to lengths of conduit sections such as fluid transport tubing, for purposes of transferring contents (typically fluid) from one receptacle to another. To ensure the fluid transfer occurs under sterile conditions, the sanitary fittings at the terminal ends of the fluid transport tubing are clamped together along with a seal or gasket so that the fluid can be transferred between sections of tubing without exposure to the external environment.
Several types of clamps and clamping mechanisms for use with conduit sections and fittings are known. For example, clamps may be molded of a rigid plastic material and formed as a unitary piece or as two separate pieces connected together by coupling mechanisms. These conventional clamps may be awkward to handle as a result of the exterior design of the clamps. As a result, these clamps are capable of over-compression on the conduit sections which may cause a gasket clamped between the conduit sections to extrude out of the fittings (e.g., a catastrophic failure to sterility). In addition, these clamps are typically designed as single use clamps which cannot be disconnected from the fittings without destroying or otherwise damaging the clamping mechanism. In some settings it may be desirable to reuse a clamp with multiple sanitary fittings and conduit sections, but the known clamps do not allow for such reuse.
Conventional clamps and clamping mechanisms also suffer from additional disadvantages. Several types of conventional clamps such as threaded nut adjusted clamps can be difficult to properly secure to the flanges of the fittings in such a manner that the gasket properly seals the two fittings or conduit sections together. Other conventional designs try to avoid the problem of over-compressing the gasket by spacing apart the free ends of a snap-like clamp. However, these designs tend to fail to provide 360 degree coverage around the periphery of the flanges and the gasket, which can also lead to extrusion of the gasket and catastrophic failure of the seal between the conduit sections.
It would be desirable to provide a reusable clamp and method for connecting conduit sections and sanitary fittings that addresses these and other disadvantages of the conventional clamps of the prior art.